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The Moonbase alpha on earth's runaway moon: botanist Dan Mateo
(Giancarlo Prete) has developed a machine to communicate with plants
telepathically, but in one experiment something goes horribly wrong, &
from here on the whole moonbase suffers from freak temperature drops &
even freakier winds (inside the moonbase !!). & then the moonbase's
doctor Russell (Barbara Bain) even has some strange vision of a mutilted
crewman (Valentino Musetti), who seems to vanish into thin air &
cannot be accounted for ...
So Commander Koenig has no alternative but to shut down Mateo's
experiments (much to his dismay) to try to normalize the situation ... but
not so, soon enough both Mateo's boss Warren (Anthony Nicholls) & his
assistant Laura (Hilary Dwyer) are brutally murdered after they had a rowe
with Mateo - but Mateo has a watertight alibi.
Soon it is found out that at the time of the murders something was
measured at the scene of the crime that resembles the wavelength of
Mateo's telepathy machine ... & eventually Koenig & his teanm come
up with a weird idea to get to the bottom of it all: they confine Mateo in
a forcefield that is impenetrable by the wavelength they have measured at
the scenes of the crime & wait what happens ... & soon enough some
being, looking like a horribly mutilated crewman, appears inside the
forcefield, & fights it out with Mateo - until ultimately they both
die. but once dead, the being disappears, & Mateo shows exactly the
kind of mutilations the being has shown ... it seems Alpha has been
haunted by Mateo's own spirit.
Now there's a golden rule for all sci-fi-filmmakers: Never mix
space opera & ghost story, because either of these genres lives on
suspensin of disbelief, but combined, credulity is just strained way too
far for the story still to work. But of course, if you have to absolutely
blend the 2 genres, at least refrain from letting the spirit travel
through time backwards !!!
This episode does of course all of the above, & for exactly those
reasons it doesn't work at all, & it doesn't even provide the fun
other badly written episodes of Space 1999 tend to do.
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